


Hearts Don't Break Around Here

by LayALioness



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Beach, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Mermaid Luna, Sea mechanic, Summer Vacation, they're teenagers and in love ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-22
Updated: 2017-03-22
Packaged: 2018-10-09 01:45:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10400949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LayALioness/pseuds/LayALioness
Summary: The girl sticks her head out of the water slowly, so slowly that at first it’s lost in the movement of the water and Raven doesn’t notice. But then her eyes catch the moonlight and shine out at her, and Raven sucks in a breath so fast it goes cold.The girl watches her for a moment, wary, before she floats up to the top of the dock, Raven’s sandal in hand.No, not float--she’s standing on something long that stretches out of the water. It takes Raven a minute to realize what it is, exactly, and then when she does she stops breathing altogether.It’s a tail. A long, scaly fish tail, the color of the ocean in the daytime, and it’s attached to the girl at her hips. She’s still holding Raven’s sandal out to her, and must be getting impatient, because she pokes it at Raven’s good knee.





	

**Author's Note:**

> watch me fill up the entire sea mechanic tag on this site, single-handedly
> 
> title from ed sheeran

Raven doesn’t expect to like the beach. She hates sand, as a concept, and while she loves swimming, she doesn’t really see the appeal in swimming in the ocean. There are waves, and an undertow, and a lot of other things she’d rather not deal with. It seems like a lot of unnecessary hardship, when she could just go to the pool at the Y instead.

But in the end it isn’t like she really has a choice; Sinclair has to go to the beach for a work trip, and no matter how hard Raven tried to convince him that he could just leave her home alone, he didn’t bite. So now she’s at the beach too, staring at the water critically.

“You know it isn’t going to bite you, right?” Sinclair teases, but Raven can tell he’s sort of nervous. He wants her to have fun, and it’s one of those endearingly annoying things about him. The sort of thing she thinks most kids endure with their parents. She’s still getting used to it--they’re both still getting used to navigating this whole guardian-ward relationship. She isn’t his daughter, not really, but she’s the closest thing he’ll probably ever get.

“There are sharks in the ocean,” Raven shoots back, even though she isn’t actually worried about them. She’s seen the Shark Week documentaries. She knows they mostly just stick to themselves, and the ocean is their _home_ , so it’s not like she can be mad about them being there. She’s the one intruding. “They might bite me.”

“If one does, just hit it very firmly on the nose,” Sinclair says, seriously, and Raven can’t tell if he’s kidding or not. “Like a dog.”

“I’m pretty sure sharks and dogs are very different,” she says, but she’s trying not to smile now, and that might have been his real motive the whole time. Sinclair is really invested in making sure she’s happy, and it’s a lot to handle. Raven hasn’t ever had anyone care so much.

Well, maybe Finn did, once. But that was different, and anyway part of the reason they even came to the stupid beach is so she can aggressively _not_ think about Finn. If anything’s going to ruin her vacation, it’s not going to be her ex-boyfriend. It’s going to be the sand.

Sinclair spent the whole morning packing a beach bag with absolutely everything they might possibly need on their outing, including but not limited to: sunscreen, granola bars, gatorade and water bottles in equal amounts, towels, goggles, sunglasses, an extra soft brace in case hers doesn’t take to the saltwater, a collection of magazines he bought at the gas station, and an extra bathing suit for each of them. Raven picks up one of the magazines, an old _Tiger Beat_ advertising one of the Jonas Brothers.

“Did you think I’d really get bored enough to read this? The beach house is like five minutes away, I can just walk home and play Zelda.”

Sinclair takes the magazine and puts it back in the bag, good naturedly. “I thought you might like the option. Kids like boy bands, right? That’s still a thing.”

“You’re not even that _old_ ,” Raven grins. He’s in his thirties. He’s technically old enough to be her biological dad, but he would have been pretty young when she was born. “And anyway, the band broke up. Nick’s solo now, like Justin Timberlake. He’s even got the buzzcut. Keep up, Sinclair.”

“You know you can call me by my first name now,” he says, amused. “I think we’re past a surname basis, Reyes.”

“It’s a sign of endearment,” she assures him, even though it’s not totally true. She just doesn’t know how to totally shift from thinking of him as her phys apps teacher, to thinking of him as her legal guardian, for all that she’s lived with him now for a little over three months. Raven doesn’t want to start getting comfortable, only for him to realize that he doesn’t actually want her.

She knows he wouldn’t do that, but Raven has spent most of her life being unwanted. It’s a hard feeling to shake off.

She leans back into the bag and plucks out a pair of strappy goggles. “You’re like Vacation Mary Poppins,” she decides, toeing at the rest of his supplies before shooting him a sunny smile. “At least if a shark attacks me, it might take the other leg so I can get cool cyborg implants.”

Sinclair’s still getting used to her self-deprecating humor, but he’s _trying_ , and it’s nice. She knows his first instinct is to ask how her bad leg is, if she’s in pain, what he can do for her, but he also knows she doesn’t like being fussed over, so he’s doing his best to curb the impulse. “Maybe it’ll take both, so you can get a rocket-powered wheelchair.”

“That’s the least it can do for me, yeah.”

Raven heads off towards the water as Sinclair lays out a towel and settles in with his book, a cheap paperback romance that he probably found in the clearance section of a Whole Foods. That’s one of the things she’s learned since moving in with him--Sinclair is a hopeless romantic. He has a copy of every classic chick flick that theaters show on Valentine’s Day, and a collection of truly sappy romance books from airport malls and grocery stores. It’s one of those strange puzzle pieces that she’s had to fit into her mental image of Jacopo Sinclair, Physics Applications teacher and pseudo-dad. He also collects travel mugs, and t-shirts with embarrassing puns.

It’s still early in the summer, and only mid-morning, so the beach isn’t too crowded and the waves aren’t that strong in the shallows. Raven doesn’t really want to chance swimming any further out; she can’t see a lifeguard, and she’s not stupid. She’ll work up to it.

She’s wearing the brace that she swims in at the Y, the one that she got especially for water physical therapy after the accident, but they were right to be nervous about the salt. She can feel it getting stiff, and every time a wave tugs at her legs, it starts to slip a little. In the end she only lasts half an hour before getting tired and sore enough to head back.

Sinclair is right where she left him, nearly halfway through his book already, both because it’s light reading and because he’s reads fast. He glances up at her through his sunglasses. “No sharks?”

“Maybe later,” she says, flopping down on her own towel, a Barbie-bright shade of pink that he got just for her. He also got a matching blue one, just in case she preferred cool colors, because he’s Sinclair.

“Well if you get stung by a jellyfish, just pee on the wound,” he tells her, going back to his book.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Raven pulls out the _Tiger Beat_ and he tries not to look smug.

Raven may technically be on vacation, but it’s still a work trip for Sinclair, and so after that first day she’s pretty much left to her own devices. He clearly feels bad about it, and even offers to try to get out of most of the workshop, but she just waves him off.

“You know I’ve been taking care of myself since I was like, seven,” she points out, and it’s one of those arguments that doesn’t make him feel better, but does at least remind him that she’s mostly self-sufficient.

“But you shouldn’t _have_ to,” he sighs. “I’ll be home every night for dinner, at least. And we should be able to hit the beach together a few more times. If you need me, don’t hesitate to call.”

That’s another new thing--he bought her a phone, and not just the cheap prepaid kind, either. It’s sleek and brand new and Raven doesn’t like touching it because she’s scared it’s going to break.

“You know you could have just let me stay home,” she points out, for the third time.

Sinclair grabs a breakfast bar on his way out the door. “But then I’d miss out on all your ocean criticisms.”

“I don’t _hate_ the ocean, I just think the pool is better and more convenient.”

That doesn’t stop her from going back to the beach, though.

The beach house that they’re staying in is nice, all open-plan layouts and wide windows and warm light, but there’s only so much for her to _do_ there. She plays her Game Boy for a while and then flips through some more of Sinclair’s magazines and then flips on the TV, but they only get three channels and she’s not really interested in picking between news or two soap operas. So, beach it is.

Raven spends most of the day going back and forth between the water and the shore, and doesn’t notice the burn on her shoulders until she’s walking back to the house around sundown. Sinclair is already inside, cooking dinner on the stove, and she fishes around in his bag for the giant bottle of aloe vera she knows he packed.

“Did you have fun?” he asks, voice pointedly light in a way that means he cares too much about her answer.

Raven can feel the skin on her back starting to peel, and her leg is sore and achey, and she’s going to be scrubbing sand out of her hair for weeks. But she’s also on _vacation_ , at a _beach_ , and she hasn’t had to scrub puke up off the bathroom floor for three months now, so things could be worse. “Yeah.”

Raven hasn’t slept through a full night since the accident. Sinclair doesn’t know, or at least if he does he hasn’t brought it up, which makes her sure he doesn’t. If he did, he would try to help, which is why she hasn’t told him.

The nightmares aren’t _bad_ , not really. She’s not even sure they count as nightmares. They’re just dreams that leave her feeling empty, which she knows isn’t better. One minute, she and her mom are in the car, just fifteen minutes from their shitty trailer--and the next, she’s blinded by headlights and opening her mouth to scream. That’s always when she wakes up. Right before the impact.

At Sinclair’s, when she can’t sleep, Raven usually just watches TV downstairs with the volume low, or works on homework or something. But she didn’t bring any schoolwork with her, and the beach house is small enough that if she turned on the TV, it might wake him up. So she pulls on her shoes and goes for a walk, instead.

The town they’re staying in is small enough to walk across, filled with pastel blue bed and breakfasts, and quaint tourist shops selling little ships in glass bottles and windchimes made out of sea glass and dried out sand dollars. But it’s a sleepy, family-friendly kind of beachside town, where everything closes promptly at six, and nobody stays out past sundown. It’s definitely not a college spring break destination spot, which means Raven’s only real option at three in the morning is the beach itself.

She wanders down along the sand, packed hard by the tide, sea shining and dark in the moonlight. Sea shells and bottle caps half-buried blink back at her from the sand. She walks until she reaches the dock that shrimpers and fishermen use in the morning. Lobster traps bob down in the water before, and she’s pretty sure she saw a guy carrying two baby sharks in a bucket earlier that afternoon. Raven walks down to the end of the wooden planks and then sits down with a huff, dangling her feet out over the edge. There are sea-smoothed pebbles littering the dock, and she plucks one up, tossing it down in the water to watch the surface ripple.

She tosses a second, and then a third, and is about to toss another when one shoots back up at her, skittering across the wood just a few inches from her hip.

Raven stares at the rock, making a puddle where it’s landed, at the water, and then back at the rock. For a moment, nothing happens. She drops the last pebble and waits.

There’s a beat, and then it comes flying back at her, like the ocean itself just spit it out.

Raven squints, trying to see past the surface, but of course she can’t. Maybe it’s a fish. Fish are weird. There are tons of different kinds she knows nothing about; it seems possible.

Or maybe it’s a diver, and they’re fucking with her. It could be anything, honestly. It’s not like she’s an ocean aficionado.

She considers her options, before slowly unstrapping her sandal, and letting it fall to the water with a plop. If it doesn’t get thrown back at her, she’ll lose a shoe, which will suck and be kind of difficult to explain to Sinclair in the morning. But she’s pretty sure it’s going to get thrown back at her. Raven has good instincts.

The girl sticks her head out of the water slowly, so slowly that at first it’s lost in the movement of the water and Raven doesn’t notice. But then her eyes catch the moonlight and shine out at her, and Raven sucks in a breath so fast it goes cold.

The girl watches her for a moment, wary, before she _floats_ up to the top of the dock, Raven’s sandal in hand.

No, not float--she’s standing on something long that stretches out of the water. It takes Raven a minute to realize what it is, exactly, and then when she does she stops breathing altogether.

It’s a tail. A long, scaly _fish_ tail, the color of the ocean in the daytime, and it’s attached to the girl at her hips. She’s still holding Raven’s sandal out to her, and must be getting impatient, because she pokes it at Raven’s good knee.

“You’re a mermaid,” Raven blurts, feeling all at once stupid and thrilled. A _mermaid_ is standing, sort of, right in front of her. She wonders idly if she might still be asleep.

“Yes,” the mermaid says, and she sounds kind of amused. She still looks nervous, like she’s worried Raven might try something nefarious, and she’s ready to escape back into the water at any moment.

Raven moves slowly, like when she’s trying not to scare a stray dog, and takes her sandal back. It’s soaking wet, but she straps it on anyway. “Thanks.”

“You threw it at me,” the mermaid points out. She doesn’t _look_ older than Raven, but Raven isn’t sure how mermaids age. She could be immortal, like elves or something. She could be three hundred years old.

“I didn’t _throw_ it,” Raven says, and the mermaid smiles. “I’m Raven.”

“Like the bird?”

“Yeah.” She studies the mermaid, trying to be subtle about it but probably failing. It’s just--she’s a _mermaid_. She is actually having a conversation with a girl that’s half-fish. It’s surreal.

It doesn’t help that the human half is very pretty, in a way that’s both hard to look at and impossible to turn away from. Her hair is still wet from the water, but Raven can tell that it’s curly, half-tangled in wild braids made from colored fishing lures and lines she must have collected from the docks. She’s all smooth, brown skin covered in a sheen of water that reflects the moon so it looks like she’s shining. She’d be the picture of every European fantasy drawing if she was white, but as it is, she’s still prettier than Raven ever would have expected a sea creature to be. If she’d had to give a guess as to what mermaids looked like, she would have assumed way more fangs and fins and bulbous fish eyes would be involved.

She almost wants to mention it, but it’s not like she can just ask the mermaid why she’s so hot.

“Luna,” the mermaid says. “My name is Luna.” It’s so fitting that Raven actually laughs.

“Like the moon?” she teases, and feels her stomach flip when Luna ducks to hide a smile. She _would_ get a stupid crush on the two-week vacation she was supposed to spend not thinking about feelings. On a _mermaid_.

“Yes.”

Raven kicks her feet out a little, wincing when her bad leg gives a twinge of resistance. Luna watches her carefully, drifting closer, until she’s leaning with one scaled hip against the edge of the dock.

“So, do you throw rocks at all the tourists?” Raven asks, and Luna gives her an incredulous look.

“You threw them at me first!”

“I didn’t know you were _there_ ,” she laughs.

Luna looks back out at the sea for a moment. Her hair is starting to dry in unruly coils. It looks soft, and Raven grips the edge of the plank so she doesn’t reach out to touch it. “No,” she says, glancing back at her. “I don’t usually throw rocks at people.”

Raven feels her mouth go dry for no reason, and focuses on aggressively _not_ feeling butterflies. Butterflies are not allowed. Mermaid thing aside, she doesn’t have _time_ for a crush, and she just got out of a relationship. Which means, she’s pretty sure, that this is just a rebound thing. She’s still feeling emotionally raw and vulnerable. Of course she likes the cute mermaid. It doesn’t mean anything. “So why me?”

Luna hums, low in her throat, and it sounds incredibly inhuman, beautiful in an eerie way, like old out-of-tune jewelry boxes, or lullabies in horror movies. “You seemed sad.”

_It doesn’t mean anything._

“So you decided to throw rocks at me?”

“You threw them _first_!” Luna says, but she’s smiling openly now, and so is Raven, and no matter how much she tells it to, her heart won’t stop pounding.

Raven’s first crush was on a girl named Echo, when she was in the fourth grade. Echo was taller than all the other girls in their class, and she was louder and braver and she used to get in fist fights everyday, and she never lost. Raven was completely enamored, until Echo hit Finn on the head with a branch for no reason. He got a concussion and Echo got suspended, and Raven didn’t like her at all after that.

Finn was Raven’s best friend before she even knew what a best friend was, even though he was a whole year younger. She didn’t start to _like_ him until middle school, when he decided to grow his hair out, and he got taller than her, and she felt the first burst of excitement when he smiled at her.

He kissed her at the sixth grade dance, nervous and inexperienced, but she loved every second. It felt like all the movies--best friends who grew up together and fell in love and got married. She’d loved Finn for so long that it felt inevitable.

And then Clarke Griffin happened.

Raven doesn’t blame Clarke, she hasn’t for a while. And Clarke has been adamant about making sure Raven gets the majority of the sympathy, like she doesn’t think she’s allowed to feel sad about it, since Finn was Raven’s first. Which is obviously bullshit; he hurt both of them. They’re both allowed to be upset.

And Raven doesn’t blame Clarke, but she still feels like a bruise that hurts whenever Raven prods at it. They’re only friends because Raven’s boyfriend cheated on both of them, and that’s the kind of friendship that never feels easy. Maybe it will, one day, but Raven’s not holding her breath.

It’s been months, but Raven still hasn’t felt the kind of possibility that she felt with Echo, and Finn, until now. Until Luna.

She sneaks back into the beach house early in the morning, because Luna has to leave before the first of the fishermen get to the pier. The house is dark and quiet, Sinclair isn’t awake yet, and Raven thinks she’ll be too excited to get back to sleep, but the moment her head touches her pillow she sinks into a dream filled with bright eyes and warm water.

Raven spends the day visiting the little trinket shops and buying a few gifts for her friends back home--a snow globe with a sandcastle for Clarke, a couple of sea glass keychains for Monty and Jasper, a replica of an old pirate map for Bellamy, and even a bright yellow dried-out starfish for Finn. Because even if he was a shitty boyfriend, he’s still her best friend, technically. Raven wouldn’t know how to stop being friends with Finn. He’s the only one who knows, really knows, what things were like for her, before the accident. In a lot of ways, he feels like her last real connection to that part of her life.

She doesn’t mean to bring it up to Luna, but Luna is easy to talk to without really meaning to, and Raven ends up spilling her life story to her that night.

They’re on the dock again, with Luna lazily slouching against the wood, tail slowly gliding in the water while Raven’s legs dangle. The grain of the wood is digging grooves into the skin of her palms, where they’re holding her weight up.

Luna listens without watching, or adding commentary, or giving any sort of indication that she’s listening at all. Raven takes a breath when she’s finished, and finally Luna speaks.

“You can love someone even after they’ve hurt you. Love rarely just _stops_ when we want it to,” she says, and it sounds like she’s speaking from experience. She glances at Raven through long lashes, and then looks back at the sea. “But that doesn’t mean you have to forgive them. And it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve better.”

Raven blinks back at her. “I know that,” she says, but she’s not sure if it’s true. She’s known, intellectually, that it wasn’t her fault that Finn cheated on her. Even he was quick to reassure her that she’d done nothing wrong.

But she still couldn’t stop that persistent thought in the back of her head, that she simply wasn’t good enough. No amount of science fair ribbons or soccer trophies could chase it away. Raven kept them on her bookshelf, shiny plastic rows of proof of her accomplishments, proof that she was smart and talented and everything else that people liked to think girls like her aren’t. Girls from grubby metal trailers, with stained clothes from Goodwill and a drunk for a mom.

The day she found out about Clarke, Raven got home from school and she stared at those trophies and for the first time in a long time, she thought she might not be good enough, after all.

“Good,” Luna hums, and the sound sends a shiver up Raven’s spine. “You do--deserve better.”

Raven squints at her. The moon is bright and nearly full above them, and it shines off of Luna’s skin like the water. “How old are you, anyway?”

Luna _smirks_ , and it feels--dangerous. In all the best ways. “In human years?”

It feels like a joke, so Raven rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t press the issue. She’s not sure if she really wants to know that the mermaid she has a crush on is older than Feudal Japan. “How come you know so much about this stuff? Relationship stuff,” she clarifies, when Luna raises a brow. If she notices that Raven’s fishing for information about her love life, she gives no sign.

“I had a Finn myself once,” she says, voice soft. “His name was Derrick.”

“Was he a mermaid too? Or, a merman, I guess.”

“No.” Luna doesn’t elaborate, but Raven is still curious.

“What happened to him?”

Luna looks down at her tail, gone still in the water. “He died.”

Raven doesn’t ask about him again.

Things change between them after that. Luna starts to speak, more than just responding to Raven’s endless questions. She unravels herself slowly, and there’s still a lot that Raven doesn’t know, like her age or how she ended up in this corner of the ocean. But she does know that Luna’s favorite color is brown (”Like this,” she’d said, thumbing at the braid in Raven’s hair). She knows that she has a brother, although she hasn’t seen him for years (”I don’t know how that’s possible,” Raven said, thinking about the Blakes, the only siblings she’s ever really known. She couldn’t imagine them existing apart from each other. “If I had a sibling, I wouldn’t know how to not be close to them.” “It’s hard sometimes,” Luna sighed. “But we’re better apart. We were just too different, in the end. We didn’t know how to stay together.”).

She knows that Luna can speak a variety of human languages, picked up from her travels through different seas, and she knows that she likes French the best, which she learned in the waters of Côte d'Azur. She knows that Luna collects stray fishing lures and beaded bracelets and anything else that she thinks is pretty, and can tie into her hair, like a crow collecting bottle caps. She knows that Luna is glad that she left home, but she still gets kind of lonely.

Why else would she spend her summer nights talking with some sixteen-year-old girl? She must be totally bored.

“You seem to be having fun,” Sinclair mentions that Saturday. He was right, when he said she wouldn’t be seeing much of him through the week, but he does have the weekend off still, so they’ve wandered back to the beach, Sinclair working on his _third_ shitty romance book while Raven works on her tan.

“Yeah, _Cosmo Girl_ ’s right; apparently enough sunlight on a beach can cure teenage depression right up.”

Sinclair snorts. “I’m glad me dragging you on vacation hasn’t _totally_ ruined your summer,” he teases and Raven bites at her lip, because now she’s thinking about Luna, and she has to look away. It doesn’t take much for Luna to drift into her mind, these days.

“No,” she agrees. “Not _totally_ ruined.”

Raven practically _skips_ to the dock that night, and if her leg wasn’t half-paralyzed and wrapped in a brace, she actually might have. In her pocket, she feels the weight of a glass bottle. It’s nail polish, a shade of brown that matches her hair almost perfectly. It was an impulse buy from the CVS, and she’s eager to see Luna’s face when she gives it to her.

Luna is waiting for her under the dock, just like every other night. Raven drops a pebble into the water, signalling her arrival, and then swings her legs out to sit while Luna drifts up beside her.

“What are those?”

Raven follows Luna’s gaze to her feet; she’s wearing her sneakers, because one of the straps on her sandals broke and she hasn’t gotten around to fixing it yet. The sneakers are a pair of old dusty gray Converse, but not too worn. The laces are stained from age, and the plastic white toes are scrawled with her friends’ signatures from the last day of school, before everyone drifted off for the summer. There’s Clarke’s neat cursive and Bellamy’s name in messy block letters and Finn’s and Monty’s and Jasper’s. Octavia tried to draw a butterfly on the edge, but her marker was too thick and so it looks more like a lopsided heart.

“Shoes,” she says, and Luna makes a face at her. She’s been doing that lately, copying some of the things Raven does, like she’s taking lessons at social interaction. It’s cute.

“Are these names of the people you love?”

Raven snorts. “Yeah, kind of. More like the people I’m forced to put up with at school, but same difference.”

Luna hesitates for a moment before asking “Are only people from your school allowed to sign them?”

Her voice is light in a way that feels heavy, and Raven grins. “Luna, do you want to sign my shoes?”

“I have nothing to write with.”

Raven casts around for a pen that a tourist might have dropped somewhere, before remembering the nail polish in her pocket. She hands it over, and absolutely refuses to blush.

“It’s technically for your nails, but I think it’ll do the trick.”

Luna stares at the bottle, rolling it in her fingers before finally looking back to Raven. Her face is unreadable. “You brought me nail paint?”

“Nail _polish_ ,” Raven corrects, and she’s still not blushing, but she is starting to feel nervous about it. What if she doesn’t like it? What if she thinks it’s silly? How is she even supposed to use it, when she spends most of her time underwater? Where will she _keep_ it? It’s not like her mermaid tail has pockets. “Yeah, I know it’s kind of dumb, but you said you liked brown and--”

Luna looks Raven in the eye and Raven’s breath catches at what she sees there. She looks serious, and _fond_. Like somehow she thinks a three dollar bottle of nail polish is actually endearing. “Thank you, Raven.”

“It was on sale.”

Luna smiles like she can’t help it. “Thank you anyway.” She ends up painting a crescent moon in the bit of space left on Raven’s left shoe. “Perhaps I should add my name,” she muses. “What if you forget it’s from me?”

Raven manages to keep her voice dry, through a supreme amount of effort. “I’m pretty sure I’ll remember.” It’s the understatement of the century. She won’t be able to forget Luna even if she tries, which she won’t. She’s probably the most exciting thing that’s ever going to happen to her.

Part of her thinks that Luna might actually feel the same, or at least that she likes her, maybe even more than just as friends. When she catches Luna watching her through her lashes, like she can’t really figure her out, or like she doesn’t really want to. Each time, Raven’s heart picks up like it’s training for a marathon, and she thinks about just _telling_ her. Or maybe just leaning in and kissing her, to see if Luna might kiss her back.

But then she reminds herself that there isn’t any point; even if Luna does feel the same, Raven’s only sticking around for another two weeks, and then she’ll go back to her real home and her real life, free of moonlit beaches and beautiful mermaids that look like supermodels. And Raven isn’t sure she’d rather leave knowing that said supermodel mermaid is a good kisser.

Because she has to be a good kisser. You can’t just look as good as Luna does, and _not_ be a good kisser. It wouldn’t be fair.

She goes back the next night to find Luna waiting with a gift of her own.

“You didn’t have to,” Raven says, even as she stares at the present. It’s a bracelet, made of braided cord that might have come from some sort of fishing net, dyed the same colors as the yarn in Luna’s hair. Pearls are tangled intricately throughout, like stars blinking back at her as she twists it around in her hands.

“I know,” Luna says, tying it firmly around her wrist. She gives it a tug, to make sure it’ll hold, and looks pleased when Raven can’t stop touching it. “You like it.”

“I love it,” Raven says, swallowing the other words that threaten to claw their way up her throat. She really shouldn’t be this affected by a DIY bracelet made from ocean trash, but Luna _made_ it. Just for her.

She’s kept the bird necklace that Finn made for her in shop class, but that was different. It was a birthday present, made for a special occasion. This is something else, made just because Luna wanted to.

Raven can count on one hand, the number of times someone has given her something simply because they wanted to make her happy.

“I always want you to be happy,” Luna says, when she admits why she’s acting weird. She says it so easily that Raven wants to cry.

She doesn’t, obviously. But she doesn’t stop touching the bracelet, either.

In the end, it takes Raven two weeks to crack, because that’s how long it takes before Clarke calls to check in on her.

“Oregon is so _wet_ ,” Clarke says, in greeting, and then lets out a breath like she’s just flopped onto a mattress. Raven grins, she can’t help it. Things between her and Clarke are still awkward, and neither of them really know how to be _comfortable_ around each other yet, but Clarke combats that by ignoring it and making conversation anyway. “My dad’s at some big government conference that’s too top-secret for me to see.”

“Because you’re a Russian spy, obviously,” Raven says, and Clarke snorts, completely undignified.

“I can’t believe you figured it out. How’s the beach?”

“Sandy,” Raven says. “Also pretty wet.”

“Water: you can’t escape it.”

“It’s almost like it makes up seventy percent of the planet,” Raven muses, as if her thoughts haven’t immediately drifted to Luna, at the _mention_ of water. She has a problem, clearly. It’s been long enough that she’s forgotten how much crushes _suck_. They take up all of her thoughts and energy, and she hates it. She’s touching the bracelet again, tracing the smooth shell of a pearl. She hasn’t taken it off once.

But worst of all is the constant aching thought that maybe, _maybe_ she likes her back.

Clarke must have been talking while she was zoning out, because when Raven tunes back in, she’s saying “Hello, earth to Raven? Are you being attacked by a shark right now?”

Raven is currently sitting upside down on a wicker chair on the porch of the beach house, because the rush of blood sometimes helps her think better, and she was working on a sudoku puzzle before Clarke called.

“Yes.”

“Then you should probably hang up on me and call 911,” Clarke says, pragmatic. When Raven doesn’t even give a pity laugh, she says “What’s wrong? Does your vacation suck too?”

“No,” Raven says, but even she can tell her voice is off, and Clarke is like a bloodhound when she thinks her friends might be upset, trying to sniff out their true feelings so she can fix the problem, whatever it is. “I met someone.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Clarke says, and Raven didn’t have a lot of girl friends growing up, so she didn’t really go through the whole teasing each other about crushes during sleepovers thing, like she’s seen in movies. But she’s pretty sure that’s what’s happening. “Does this someone have a name?”

She can practically hear Clarke waggling her eyebrows for effect. Honestly, she’s worse than Bellamy.

“Luna.” It’s safe enough; Clarke likes girls too, Raven knows, and it’s not like she’s told her the whole truth, fishtail and all. But it still feels like she’s giving something away, somehow. She’s kept Luna to herself for so long, and Raven doesn’t really want to share her. She can be selfish, sometimes.

“Sounds pretty,” Clarke chirps, and Raven laughs. The blood is starting to pool up on her sinuses, so she spins around until she’s rightside up again, and waits for the dizziness to subside.

“She is. _Really_ pretty,” Raven adds, because it’s still safe, and she’s said this much already. Clarke isn’t the only one that can brag.

“Have you kissed her yet?”

She swallows a dramatic sigh. Raven isn’t used to being the dramatic one. She’s _friends_ with the dramatic ones, and she makes fun of them for it, when they come to her to fix their problems. She’s used to making complicated things simple; it’s what makes her a good math tutor. When Raven is facing a problem, she doesn’t look for a way around it. She goes through.

But her only real experience in love is Finn, and Finn was already simple. They grew up together. She knew him like she knew herself; of course she liked him, and of course she told him, and of course he liked her too. Finn hadn’t ever felt like a gamble. He wasn’t even a calculated risk.

With Luna, Raven still has no idea where she stands, and that’s the troubling part. If she says something, she might lose what she already has; nightly conversations on the dock that have become her favorite part of the summer. And Raven isn’t good at losing.

But if she says something, Luna might say she feels the same, and things would be so much _better_. For two weeks.

“No,” she admits. “I don’t even know if she likes me back.”

“Well there’s only one way to find out,” Clarke says, pragmatic.

“Why are you giving me relationship advice?” Raven asks. “We have the same amount of experience. You’re a disaster at love, too.”

“That’s why I know how to help,” she points out. “You can tell me what to do, when I’m having relationship issues. We’ll take turns.”

“That’s exactly what I look for in a friendship,” Raven says.

“I know you’re being sarcastic, but it’s still kind of true. Hang on for a sec,” Clarke says something to someone in the distance, and then comes back. “Okay dad’s back and we have to go get dinner.”

“Yeah, turns out you need food to live.”

“Shut up,” Clarke says cheerily. “Good luck with Luna. I’ll call you later.” She hangs up without waiting for a goodbye. Clarke is the kind of friend that cares deeply about other people, but everything still has to be on her terms.

Raven follows Sinclair to one of the nice family-run restaurants in town, to have dinner with his colleagues. It’s weird seeing so many of her teachers outside of a school setting, but at least she’s getting a meal out of it. And Sinclair even lets her try some of his wine, as a bonus.

She isn’t drunk when she goes to see Luna that night; Sinclair would never let her get that far. Luna is already sitting on the edge of the dock, apparently confident that no one but Raven will see her. Raven’s not even tipsy, honestly, she only had a few sips. But she likes to think the alcohol gave her enough of a push to sit so close to Luna that they’re pressed up together, skin to skin and scale.

Luna runs cool, like water, or a summer breeze. The perfect temperature.

Raven has been rolling different words around in her mind ever since the conversation with Clarke, seeing which ones fit together better, to get her point across. But then suddenly she’s next to Luna, touching her, feeling each of her breaths and all her carefully planned sentences fall out of her head completely. It’s just as well; she’s never been one for speeches, anyway. Raven mostly speaks through her actions.

“How was your day?” Luna asks. Her tail is trailing through the water, shimmering just under the surface, and Raven wants to stroke a hand down the length. She wants to know what every part of Luna feels like.

Raven hasn’t had a single nightmare since that first night, and she thinks it might be because of Luna, and she knows it doesn’t technically mean that they’re soulmates or anything, but--it has to mean something, right? In the end, it doesn’t really matter if she leaves town in two weeks, because Raven’s already decided; she can’t just have this, as it is. Four weeks one summer, and then nothing. She can’t go back to a life without magic, and the way that Luna makes her feel so light that she might just close her eyes and float off to space. She’ll buy Luna a waterproof phone if she has to.

“Yeah,” she says. “It would have been better with you, though.”

Luna turns to look at her, face carefully blank. “Oh?”

Raven takes a breath and holds it, reaching over to slide her hand into Luna’s where it rests in her lap. Her skin is impossibly smooth, poreless, and there are shallow webs connecting the brown skin of her fingers. The shiny brown polish on her nails flickers with the movement. “I always feel better around you.”

She can hear Luna’s throat work when she swallows, that’s how close they are. “Oh,” Luna says again, softer.

Raven thinks back to the night when things changed between them, when she handed all of her insecurities and tangled past to Luna, and she took them like they were a gift. _You deserve better_ , she’d said, and Raven actually believed her.

“You deserve better too,” she says now, and Luna keeps watching her, eyelashes catching the moon like spun silver. “You deserve to be happy, Luna.” And then she kisses her.

Raven has thought about what it might be like to kiss a mermaid, idly, since she was seven and watched _The Little Mermaid_ for the first time. Ariel was her first fictional crush, and maybe that should have been a sign, or some sort of omen.

Kissing a real mermaid is nothing like kissing an imaginary one, of course, because real kisses are never the same as daydreams. Luna is soft under her hands, her mouth moving against hers like a current, and she tastes like salt but not like the ocean.

Luna moves her hands up and down Raven’s arms, curving around her shoulder blades to pull her even closer, and Raven moves hers onto Luna’s neck, gentle over her gills, and into her hair. She kisses her and kisses her, and Luna keeps kissing her back.

“I’m happy with you,” Luna sighs, once they pull apart for oxygen. They’re lying on their backs staring up at the sky. She idly plays with Raven’s hair, while Raven traces the scales on her hip bones.

It sounds like a confession, and Raven treats it like one, smoothing her hand up the skin of her stomach, her chest, her collarbone, while Luna shudders under her touch.

“Me too.”

They kiss until just before sunup, and they only stop because they manage to hear the oncoming fishermen in time, pulling apart with messy hair and bruised mouths and breathless laughter. Raven walks back to the beach house, trailed by the dawn.

Sinclair is making coffee when she walks in, and he takes her in with a yawn, hair still disheveled from sleep. “Where’d you go off to?”

Raven shrugs, unable to completely tamper her smile. The girl she likes likes her back, and she spent the night making out with a mermaid; a little enthusiasm is warranted, all things considered. “Couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk.”

Sinclair seems happy with the explanation. “You really do like the beach, huh?” he asks, and she lets him feel smug about it.

Raven takes two mugs down from the cupboard and grins. “It’s growing on me.”


End file.
